Lost in Toy Land:

Image Gallery sidney BrinkDean Evans, owner of a toy store and farm toy museum in Stover

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Toy Store and Farm Toy Museum owner Dean Evans is well-versed in both model tractors and tractor models and when he dies, he knows exactly what will happen.

'My wife's going to call the auctioneer before she calls the funeral home,' he said, laughing as he stood outside the building that houses hundreds of toy tractors.

The collection includes a few he played with as a youngster growing up on a farm in Humeston, Iowa, in the 1940s and '50s.

Dean, about to turn 54, never strayed too far off the farm as an adult until the late 1980s, when he started thinking a change might be in order. He remembers clearly the incident that clinched his decision: at his farm sale in April 1990, he traded his Case 400 tractor for six toy counterparts.

'I wasn't going to get what I wanted (in cash) for it, so I made a trade,' Dean explained. He got a 2390 Case, a 1456 International, and four others the makes of which he can't recall.

Most of the 700 toy tractors and farm implements in his collection are brightly painted - green John Deeres and Olivers, blue Fords, red Internationals and Massey-Harrises and so on. But Dean hasn't yet been able to bring himself to touch with any brush the dull gray, late-1940s John Deere 'A' with the closed flywheel.

'That was the first one I had as a kid,' he explained, chuckling as he hefted it in his hand. 'I wore the paint off long, long ago. It was made from a melted-down piston because regular iron was scarce during the war.'

Dean doesn't have a laugh and a line for each toy in his collection - it just seems that way. Consider, for example, hay balers. He has models of conventional round and square balers, in addition to today's types that turn out 9-foot-long bales weighing up to 2,200 pounds.

'It just got so you couldn't get high school kids to haul in the smaller square bales anymore,' he said. 'They thought there had to be some easier way to make money in the summer, and usually, there was. With the big bales, human hands never touch them.'

He also has such relics of the pre-com-bine era as corn pickers and threshing machines.

'They called 'em corn pickers, but they usually left some behind on the ground,' he said. 'That's another way we made spending money back then - just selling what the picker left behind.'

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print